Kids gain valuable skills from time online

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, November 20, 2008

Rather than wasting their time, children who gab on Facebook or play online games are gaining valuable social skills and learning some technology basics, according to a study to be released today.

The report, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, contradicts the idea held by many educators, parents and policymakers that children should be blocked from online social networks and video games like Halo, which allow users in different locations to play together. Instead, children should be encouraged to use the technologies to gain a certain level of digital literacy, the study said.

Mizuko Ito, a research scientist in UC Irvine's department of informatics who led the study, said that children who don't have access to some of today's most popular online diversions risk being social outsiders lacking some of the basic skills necessary to function in the Internet age.

"There is this generational gap in thinking about the value that social networking brings," she said.

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Facebook and MySpace, which offer users the ability to create personal home pages, have become some of the Internet's most popular sites over the past few years. Many adolescents use the services - some for hours a day - to keep in touch with friends by posting updates, sharing photos and adjusting their profiles.

But critics have called social networking a distraction and, in some cases, a danger because of the potential for children to befriend strangers. Hoping to limit children's use of the services, some schools now block access to such sites.

Called the Digital Youth Project, the study was conducted over three years starting in 2005 during which a team of researchers interviewed more than 800 kids and observed teens online for more than 5,000 hours. The goal was to provide an ethnographical view of how children use social media - an umbrella term for social-networking and video-sharing sites and multiplayer video games - to socialize, relax and learn.

Children use technology to maintain "always on" communication with their friends, through social networking, instant messaging and text messaging, the study said. These forms of contact have emerged as the new public hangout for teens, replacing school hallways, shopping malls and the street.

Take the example cited in the report of two dating 17-year olds who wake up and immediately instant message each other, then switch to mobile phones while on route to campus, then send text messages during class. After spending time together doing homework, they talk on the phone or send text messages to say good night and "I love you."

Parents may find the new digital reality mystifying because it didn't exist during their childhoods, the researchers said. But barring children from it, they concluded, eliminates an important social and recreational activity and could leave them ignorant of how to interact, not only in their youth, but also potentially in their professional lives.

For a minority of children, the casual use of social media served as a springboard to them gaining technological expertise - labeled in the study as "geeking out," the researchers said. By asking friends or getting help from people met through online groups, some children learned to adjust the software code underpinning some of the video games they played, edit videos and fix computer hardware.

Given that the use of social media serves as inspiration to learning, schools should abandon their hostility and support children when they want to learn some skills more sophisticated than simply designing their Facebook page, the study said.

Although not discussed in the study, Ito said that children need to balance the amount of time they spend online so that they can complete their homework, just like, she said, "when we were kids we had to balance the time we spent on the phone."